The Wyrd Sisters

Earlier in the week I was discussing the PirateBay ruling with a friend, and he mentioned that copying and sharing music had happened forever, so there had to be a line drawn about legal interference with it. While I do agree to a certain extent, I am also part of the Digital Content Providers, I wanted to discuss how these things do affect the small players like me who deal with IP and digital content.

Today I sent three DMCA notices to a single site, where I found:

• 192 downloads of my Arcane Brotherhood product since the 19th of April
• 301 downloads of my Keeper of the Veil product since 10th of April
• 262 downloads of my Sayuri and Sayuri EXP pack products since February 9th

Or to put it in more tangible terms ($$$$) and JUST for what would have been my cut for it…

• $1,435.20 for Arcane Brotherhood
• $ 3,002.47 for Keeper of the Veil
• $2,455.59 for the Sayuri Hair packs.

So in little over 2 months, someone’s been giving away $6,893.26 of what should have been my money.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that 100% of the people that downloaded would have bought. But even if something as low as 10% of those people would have (perfectly reasonable number), we’re still talking of close to $700, which I don’t know about you, but for me it would be great, and actually would pay my mortgage for a whole month. Extrapolating, we could say that I’m lossing sales to piracy for at least the value of half my year’s mortgage every year. And when you put it like that, the picture is a bit more scary.

As for the argument about people testing out the waters for vendors, I *could* point you all to the threads where the same people are commenting and “thanking” the original posters for sharing. But I won’t, because I do not want to advertise where they are. If you do police these things semi-regularly, you will also notice the same people commenting over and over. So they’re not “trying” before they buy, they’re just leeching for some stupid idea of collectibles, or simply because they can. And these are not people in poor countries either: to run our stuff you need a more than decent computer, you can’t run them in hamster-wheel powered old 486s recycled and treasured for years to learn how to use computers, and frankly, if you have the $1K you need at least for a half-decent 3D-rendering rig, you can’t tell me you don’t have $15 for a hairprop, or that you can’t get the $15 with some minor savings.

I’m not a corporation. I’m not a rockstar that looses maybe 50p per pirated CD but then recoups it when the pirate goes to see them in concert and pays $40 for the ticket + 15 for a Tshirt. DAZ 3D is not exploiting me nor my creativity, and pirating my stuff is not some act of liberation. I regularly give freebies and what I think is really good customer service. I help fellow vendors, encourage newbies, helped with a Poser book (Practical Poser 7) and I’m even mentoring someone from a 3rd wolrd country so he can realise his dream. And even he has legal stuff, and when he can’t afford it, he makes do with what he does have, and *gasp* uses CREATIVITY to get over it: his latest has been to morph the Eagle 1 into a Seagull, because he couldn’t afford the $15 he needed for the seagull models in the store. THAT, my friends, is commitment and resourcefullness: not spending hours trailing the share sites to download whichever latest products are out to plunge them into a runtime and never touch them. And if there’s any justice in this world, while my friend sleeps happy knowing that each day he learns more and becomes better, the pirates of this world will go to bed every night looking at their bloated runtimes and wondering why they can’t use it, always trailing after the latest and bestest, seeking to compensate for both their lack imagination and talent to actually do the real work.

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